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5000 year-old Cuneiform tablets Go Digital
purduephotog writes "In an effort to preserve and expose scholars around the world to rapidly plundered historical texts, a joint project between the University of California and the Max Planck Institute have photographed and digitized around 60,000 tablets. An overview is available at ABCNews, while the main site can be found at at UCLA." The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.
Cuneiform is awl write!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets."
Uuuh, well, the interesting part will be to see if these digitized images of the actual tablets will be still used in 5/10/100 years, while in another 4,000 years the rocks will most likely still be readable.
Gene Gragg, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute says "It's like being able to walk into the tablet room of a museum and pick up the actual tablets", which I've read alot on these types of projects.
That's like saying if you've seen the Grand Canyon on TV there's no need to go there, or if you've seen pictures of the top of Mt. Everest there's no need to try and climb it.
Seeing a picture of something is fine, but being able to touch something that was written 4,000 years ago is a much different experience. Funny how people seem to think a representation of something is just as good as seeing it in real life.
... Are they going to be required to have an oracle license for each one of the 5000 yr old dead guys that originally created the tablets?
Most of the plundered texts wind up in private or semi-private collections. At the Oriental Institute, there was a major effort to convince people who held them to permit photographing and documentation. Since this normally involved an evaluation and a translation by an expert and had no strings attached, these plundered texts at least remained available to scholarly analysis.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.
What are you talking about? Of course the tablets will last longer. But the benefits of the digital copies are pretty nice:
1. easy to share
2. Try setting a real clay block as your desktop background image.
But it's got downsides:
1. less valuable - the real clay tablets could probably fetch you a good deal, at least on the black market, the digital ones are probably already on freenet/gnutella...
2. vulnerable to static electricity...
Almost certinaly they won't - the article at Salon mentions the digital encoding of Cuneiform images started in the 1970's in Berlin with punch-cards. Given that the technology we used only 30 years ago is already obsolete, what are the odds that in 4 millenia we'll still have the digital versions in a readable format?
I'd sooner bet on Gates and co. releasing an open-source version of Windoze...
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1801
...when they gave the university a grant to develop a new sort of web tablet.
Tablets even show up on Web auction site eBay, where bidding can start at $1.
Those cuneiform tablets are going for about $100 - $300 on ebay. I bet they'd make a great conversation piece. Not that I'd ever buy one. That would make me one of the plunder-ers.
The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/ be usable longer then the clay tablets.
...than the clay tablets.
My thingy is bigger than your thingy.
First we'll have lunch, then we'll storm the embassy.
...the really interesting thing about this is that the entire project is being funded by L. Bob Rife...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Tablet 12843 begins: "MAKE MONEY FAST"
Tablet 34935 has:
>>>> me too!
>>>
>>> me too!
>> Me Too
>
> ME TOO
--
I think that four fifths of the tablets are actually "Cuneispam".
Um, no. I promise the tablets will last longer, for reasons that should be so obvious, I'm not even going to bother listing them.
One fear a collegue of mine has is that we digitize everything and call those the cannonical versions, and then thousands of years in the future we're unable to cull accounting, historical, cultural information from this age cause it all gets lost in digital form. The fact that digical copies are much more likely to be lost while undergoing simple administrative tasks ('oops, I hit delete instead of copy') makes it even more likely that my assertion is true. Yet another case of having a hammer and making every problem a nail.
Whats the real solution? Make tons of copies, in tons of mediums, from digital to physical. That's my suggestion for historical data. And who'd do this?! US, while enjoying the works. Unfortunately, that wouldn't jive for the works of a dude whos been dead and should have had his works return to public domain awhile ago (or at least a few years ago, but Sonny Bono deep-sixed that one, as I understand it) - we face a real danger of having a very thin and fragile anthropological record centuries from now due to the current century vogue of being exeedingly restrictive with the distribution of cultural works.
"Old man yells at systemd"
"In other news, the Nam-Shub of Enki has been released onto the internet and is being rapidly disseminated through P2P file sharing. An increasing number of computer users are suffering from a strange neurological affliction the authorities have designated "Snow Crash". The Neurolinguistic Hackers' Association sent out a press release saying 'We told you this was going to happen sooner or later'."
Freedom: "I won't!"
Apparently there's a glut of these, and they have been available on eBay as cheap paperweights, starting at $1. I don't have a link, and I don't much care, so you'll have to do your own eBay / Google search.
Infuriate left and right
Take two of these and call me next millenia.
Sorry, had to do it.
Tcd004
Note this link about how an attempt to preserve an ancient book digitally ended in the ironic situation years later where the digital format was obsolete and unreadable after little more than a decade, while the ancient book was still fine.
The real problem with bit entropy can only be solved (if you ask me) by having the information regularly copied and used by at least some people [who will thus bother to migrate it into the new super-dense holographic optical processors all the kids will be using in 2080, who probably wouldn't even recognize the purpose of a shiny little 5cm disk if their lives depended on it].
The continuance of the historical record may well be a victim of excessive IP protection and laws like the DMCA, as much as that sounds like a somewhat far-fetched possibility today. Only info in an open format that is 'mirrored' by many people [and kept freshly copied into modern devices] would likely prevent this.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
The ironic part is whether the digitized versions will last/be usable longer then the clay tablets.
People, this is a RHETORICAL statement, meant to imply that the tablets will last longer. Your "Um, no, the TABLETS will last longer, asshole" posts are not pointing out the idiocy of the Slashdot editors, but instead pointing out your own second grade reading level.
I scarfed these from a website whose URL I lost. I hope they are in the public domain since they are over 4,000 years old. And yes I read _Snow Crash_ by Neal Stephenson.
Ancient Sumerian Proverbs
These gems of wisdom are more than 4,000 years old, but many of them still have relevance to us today.
In a city that has no watch dogs,the fox is the overseer.
Who possesses much silver may be happy;
who possesses much barley may be glad;
but he who has nothing at all may sleep.
Flatter a young man, he give you anything;
Throw a scrap to a dog, he'll wag his tail.
The poor men are the silent men in Sumer.
Writing is the mother of eloquence and the father of artists.
Pay heed to the word of your mother as though it were the word of a god.
A sweet word is everybody's friend.
Friendship lasts a day, kinship forever.
For a man's pleasure there is marriage;
on thinking it over, there is divorce.
Conceiving is nice; pregnancy is irksome.
The wife is a man's future;
the son is a man's refuge;
the daughter is a man's salvation;
the daughter-in-law is a man's devil.
If you take the field of an enemy,the enemy will come and take your field.
Who builds like a lord, lives like a slave.
Who builds like a slave, lives like a lord.
Be gentle to your enemy as to an old oven.
Do not return evil to your adversary; maintain justice for your enemy, do good things, be kind all your days. What you say in haste you may regret later.
Making loans is as [easy] as making love, but repaying them is as hard as bearing a child.
Go up to the ancient ruin heaps and walk around; look at the skulls of the lowly and the great. Which belongs to someone who did evil and which to someone who did good?
A thing which has not occurred since time mmemorial: a young woman broke wind in her husband's embrace.
Who has not supported a wife or child, his nose has not borne a leash.
Eat no fat and you will not have blood in your excrement.
Commit no crime, and fear [of your god] will not consume you.
Has she become pregnant without intercourse? Has she become fat without eating?
Bride, [as] you treat your mother-in-law, so will women [later] treat you.
If the beer mash is sour, how can the beer be sweet?
He who changes, neglects, transgresses, erases the words of this tablet, may the great gods of heaven and earth, who inhabit the world, all those that are named in this tablet, strike you down, look with disfavor upon you, may they chase you away from both shade and sunlight so that you cannot take refuge in a hidden corner, may food and drink forsake you, and hunger, want, famine and pestilence never leave you, may the bellies of dogs and pigs be your burial place, let tar and pitch be your food, donkey urine your drink, naphtha your ointment, river rushes your covers, and evil spirits, demons, and lurkers select your houses (as their abode).
The gods alone live forever under the divine sun; but as for mankind, their days are numbered, all their activities will be nothing but wind.
You can have a lord, you can have a king, but the man to fear is the tax collector!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I'm sure he wouldn't mind, so long as he's allowed to play the scientist/mathematician.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Except that errors in the ditization can result in the acedemics operating on mis-transmogrified information. When you work on the original, you know you're not making assumptions or working on problems that may in fact not exist in the original and simply be artifacts of the digital conversion.
A minor quibble, but lets not underestimate the importance of having a cannonical reference copy whom everyone knows and agrees represents The Truth.
Now, if you're just talking about these copies as 'working copies', fine. It just scares me that we digitize the original, lock the original up for decades, and be operating on a dataset that may potentially have errors, or use a low enough 'technology of today' resolution in the data that may result in intricate details of the original going unnoticed for an unneccessarily long time.
Good post tho, I certainly conceed that this is a good idea for 'working copies' for scientits, acedemics to work off of - just so long as they dont forget that there is a reference copy available and that they should check it when something smells funny on the working copy.
"Old man yells at systemd"
The books are not just stolen from the library, they're stolen from everyone who pays taxes, and the knowledge within is stolen from everybody.
Many posts of touched on the concept that actually "holding" the object and "feeling" it can yeild more information. This may be true. There is also a digital alternative:
Stereo Lithography!
Bet this stuff lasts as long as the clay...
-Jhon
This is really interesting to browse. Quite a large undertaking. I did find one strange thing though. I saw this tablet where I could make out the following message: All your base are belong... then... indecipherable.
Oh well, I guess we shall never know
I Heart Sorting Networks
Most folks have never heard of it, but the Perseus Project at Tufts University should be the model for the digital cuneiform library. Perseus started in the early 90s as a digital repository of texts, photos, maps, and other reference material of classical (i.e. Latin and ancient Greek) materials. (It has since expanded into other, more recent subjects, but Latin & Greek remain at its core.) Tufts has made a name for itself on the digital library/archival forefront, and they could probably provide lots of useful advice, tools, and frameworks for the cuneiform library.
One thing that the article didn't mention is just what "digitizing" means for these texts. The simplest way to do this is to store high-res photos of each tablet. Even better would be some sort of 3D imaging, because if you've ever seen cuneiform artefacts, you know that they're often in odd shapes (seal rings, stelae, as well as tablets and tablet "envelopes"), and/or broken or cracked in numerous places. But an even bigger question remains: can/will these tablets be digitized into some machine-readable format? Can cuneiform symbols be represented in Unicode? Unlike Latin and Greek works, the vast majority of cuneiform artefacts remain untranslated, but having a machine-readable format for characters can be a huge step for constructing some sort of machine translator. (I, for one, would love to work on something like this; I already work on machine learning of modern language texts.)
:wq
that the tablet I just looked at had the DeCSS code enscribed on it.
Someone you trust is one of us.
This statement got me thinking. It would be an interesting project to connect some sort of laser-etching (or even type-hammering) device to a computer so that Project Gutenberg text can be transferred to thin, metal sheets. These sheets could be specially treated for corrosion. The process could be nearly completely automated, with a binding and packaging step to ensure long-term survival of the information.
You would need to put a considerable amount of time and expense into designing and building the process, but in the end you would create an archive for historians far into the future.
Do they have the rights to do this? After all it should be up to the people who made these tablets to decide in what format they get to be used. Furthermore this copying and sharing with multiple users is certainly a copyright violation.
That on tablet 5,532 there is the first known operating version of Vi. The original scribes had talked about installing Emacs but not enough clay could be drawn from the river to compile the byte-code.
What is music when you despise all sound?
"Many of these tablets are damaged, or broken into several parts which you would have to hunt down and combine to see the whole story."
/. users.
Kinda like p2p filesharing... Hope the last piece of Gilgamesh doesn't take as long to get hold of as most things do. (We've already been waiting a long time to complete it).
"Also, cuneiform writers tended not to care much about rules of typography"
Kinda like
"...so they considered it no big deal if long sentences wrapped around the edges of a tablet."
Haha! You see! Those ancestors of Klerk's had no chance with their tablet-widening posts back then!
graspee
That's why these tablets have been digitized and catalogued already.